Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Commodore Collector Trudgery

I don't really have much exciting to say for this entry, but wanted to let blogspot know that I have been quite busy.

This beautiful Amiga 500 was purchased off eBay only because I wanted an earlier motherboard and the "Chicken Head" logo case. The original box was bonus and might have been the best part. It's gorgeous!

When it arrived, however, it had two flaws: a missing disk drive ejection button and a mostly malfunctioning keyboard.

The problem with the disk drive button was easy enough to fix, as I had a spare floppy to draw it from. The keyboard, however, was tricky. Upon very close inspection of the keyboard membrane, it turns out that several of the metal traces near the connector had gotten bent to the point of breaking. I tried using some liquid carbon with the absolute finest tipped brush I had, but was only able to bring back two or three of the dead traces that way. Luckily, someone on facebook routed me to sellmyretro.com, where someone was selling brand new (and compatible!) membranes. I dropped my repair attempts (who knows how long that liquid carbon would have held anyway) and just got a new one.

While all this was going on, I was also contacted by a Houston resident who was moving out of the country and wanted to unload all his Commodore stuff. Apparently, he was a big Commodore 128-mode and C128 CP/M-mode fan, as well as a Commodore 8-bit power user who kept up with all the latest storage, memory expansion, and accelerators.

I'm a big fan of CMD (Creative Micro Designs), who designed much of those later expansions, so I knew the deal would be a good and useful one.

Once I got as much of it home as my wagon would carry, it took weeks just to take stock. And then came very minor repairs. A CMD Hard Drive got a new SCSI drive mechanism. A pair of FD2000s swapped drive mechs so that the one with the functioning motherboard would be a fully functioning drive. A 1581 had a shorted capacitor replaced. And meanwhile, there were stacks of floppy disks to archive. All of this has kept me extremely busy to this day.

Then, on top of all this, the power supply in my CBM-256 has gone out, again, I *think*. This is the third of fourth time it has failed to power up. Most times, tinkering with it for a few weeks would make it mysteriously start working again. Once, all it needed was a new monitor fuse, but that won't work this time. The symptom is, once again, an utter lack of voltage on all lines.

So, it's hardware that has kept me busy. I've actually been looking forward to doing some software projects, but those will wait.